Morris County's website has been updated to include more information about county finances and laws.www.co.morris.nj.us/

Things are getting a little clearer for Morris County residents.

The county Board of Chosen Freeholders' transparency committee has been meeting for months about an effort to put more information online. This week, the county website began seeing significant updates, the result of that work.

Freeholder John Cesaro, who joined the board last year, said the transparency effort was inspired by Senator Joe Pennacchio, whose 2008 Transparency in Government Act "called for putting every time online."

"It's something I took on in Parsippany, and it's a dynamic that I wanted to start at the freeholder board," Cesaro said. "Everything should go online."

The committee has held several meetings with the county's professional staff to overhaul the website, and will continue its work into 2013. Cesaro said he envisions the amount of information available growing over time.

"What this kind of morphed into over time was the realization that great, you can give all of these people all of the numbers, but will they understand it?" Cesaro said.

So the transparency committee has been working on what Cesaro called the "more subjective" parts of the site overhaul — pages dedicated to explaining county government in understandable terms.

"Let's tell people what a freeholder is, how a capital project makes it onto the list. People need to understand the process," Cesaro said. "It's not just a numbers-crunching issue."

Newly selected Freeholder director Thomas J. Mastrangelo said the goal is to "get to a point where you can click and point your way through county government."

"There's a lot of paper out there, and there's a lot of information," he said. "But what the transparency committee did was prioritize what the first things should be to get out there. It's taken a lot of manpower."

Under the recent updates to the county site, it now provides agendas and minutes for freeholder meetings; has a section on finances that includes budgets, bill lists, audits, debt statements and financial statements; explains how various budgets work; provides a government organizational chart; and provides county contracts for various services.

"We want to make government accessible to everybody," Mastrangelo said.